A Teacher's Personal Blog

Archive for January, 2012

Teaching math is a little bit tricky. But if some interesting techniques are used, same teaching math can be a great fun. Here are some effective techniques and methods which you can use to teach math:

Food items can easily be used to teach mathematical concepts. It seems strange but it is a fact. If you don’t believe this then use a pizza to teach fractions to students. Students will visually see a whole and then its parts or fractions when you will cut pizza into slices. Similarly, you can use chocolate beans and jellies to help students learn subtraction, addition, multiplication and division as well. Ask kids to bring such interesting items for next day’s lecture. Kids will love to do this and they will find math as the most interesting subject. Another interesting thing! Kids can even eat food items when lesson is over.

Many kids find it difficult to learn math without seeing an example from real life. For example, to teach time to kids, you can use a small clock. Move its minute and hour hands to teach time to kids. If you are teaching kids about money, you can set a small stall having real items with price tags. Let every student to come to this stall and discover whether he/she has enough money to buy a particular item. You can also teach them hoe much money they would receive as change on buying an item.

You can also make pairs of students to help them study math as collectively. At the end of each math class, let the pairs to practice math concepts with each other’s help. This will motivate students and they will find it interesting to do math with their partner. Math is a rigid subject and it should be best learnt when done with help of peers.

If possible, arrange field trips for students to teach them different concepts. For example, if you are teaching about measurements, take a trip to some bakery where you can allow students to help bakers making a dish with accurate measurements. If you want to teach something more about money spending, take a trip to a super store.

See!! How simple are these methods. Use any one of above to teach math in a way which is never used before.